The premise of Kanye West’s Saint Pablo tour sounds like it’s based on a dare: perform an entire concert on a flying stage above the crowd. So, could he pull it off?

There were moments in West’s Toronto set that felt indelible, with the rapper/producer leaping around on his flying platform that sat above a rapturous mosh pit, bathing it in light. The man with the arena-sized ego managed to create scenes of spirited communal joy.

West isn’t the first to have dreamt up a flying stage: his collaborator Drake, his arch-nemesis Taylor Swift, and Nickelback have used smaller versions. It solves the problem of how to bring a musician closer to the fans, and recognizes that a concert hinges on how they and react and relate to one another.

True, Saint Pablo’s imagery recalls his 2014 summer festival shows, which found a masked West alone in front of a giant, monolithic screen. This tour is equally dependent on him as a central, unsupported performer, but with its stage that can tilt, bump and dip down just above fans’ heads so they could nearly touch their idol when he lies down above them. It’s dynamic and compelling.

The stark, minimalist design offered a rich range of associations harnessed and tethered, West recalled at once a skyscraper construction worker (complete with industrial gloves); a prisoner battling a chain; and a Cronenberg-esque bionic human hooked up to technology with a bumpy umbilical cord. The stage was part Blade Runner flying car (with Ridley Scott’s hazy black-and-sodium orange color scheme echoed throughout the whole show), part Close Encounters of the Third Kind musical spaceship (complete with blinding lights and fat bass synth sounds that might have shattered glass), and part Robert Wilson theatre prop.

The show’s final image could have emerged from Wilson and Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach: the tilted stage carries a crouching West slowly over the arena’s floor, from darkness through a single spotlight, and beyond, to where he disembarks on the floor, slaps some hands and exits. It’s a little grandiose and Christ-like, what with the gospel choir from Ultra Light Beam playing on repeat, but it’s also unexpectedly moving.

And when West is good, he’s very, very good. He dialed down his trademark ranting (unlike the first show in Indianapolis, which found him apologizing to Nike at length, as one does) and dialed up the hits, reaching back from Jesus Walks through a triumphant Touch the Sky to a thwacking Stronger. He also ran through most of the self-obsessed psychodrama on his endlessly reworked Life of Pablo, proving a magnetic figure, celebratory, defiant and, crucially, focused.

Implausible though it may seem, West even at times came across as an everyman, stepping out of the spotlights to the edges of the stage, and pulling on his tether as if straining against his own limitations. West may tell everyone he’s a god, but he’s compelling because he’s all too human.